


Out Here with the Daemons

by Lagerstatte



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 16:23:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11188884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lagerstatte/pseuds/Lagerstatte
Summary: They break into the hotel room when Gladio is out. There's five of them, armed with guns, and wanting Noct dead.Ignis has a strange expression; it's one Prompto doesn't recognise.





	Out Here with the Daemons

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt on the kinkmeme: http://ffxv-kinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/3892.html?thread=4685620#cmt4685620
> 
> Concrit is welcome. Thank you for reading!

They – three men, two women, locals from the town they're passing through – strike when Gladio is out. It's probably not by chance. Prompto stands, pressed shoulder to shoulder with Noct; Noct can probably feel how hard he's trembling, but Prompto's heart is in his throat and he feels so very sick, he can't bring himself to care.

In battle Noct is always up in the thick of things. He has an aggressive fighting style that probably gives Ignis and Gladio ulcers. But faced with these five people, just ordinary citizens who happen to be holding guns aimed right at them, he's standing back with Prompto, behind Ignis. He hasn't said a word since their hotel room was broken into, and the insults – anger at the crown, that these people don’t want, didn’t vote for, send taxes to and get nothing in return; at Insomnia for taking every penny whilst everyone else suffers, out here with the daemons, dying – are answered by Ignis.

Ignis tells them to go home, that no one's problems will be solved with murder. He says that it won't be worth the prison sentence, the fallout between family, end of their careers, the end of their lives as they know it. One man looks more nervous than the others, a lanky guy with curly hair and freckles, and Ignis targets him. His voice is low and persuasive.

It doesn’t work. A woman, tall and middle aged, wearing jeans and a tshirt, eyes like sharp chips of mud, fires a warning shot at Ignis’ feet. She tells him to shut up, hand over the prince and maybe there’ll be only one casualty that night.

Instead, Ignis turns his back to them. He looks at Noct with an odd expression – something like regret, perhaps, or bitter grief, and Prompto’s stomach curls in him like someone’s wringing it out in cold water.

The plates they’d left on the table clatter to the floor as Ignis upends it, leaving it propped on its side. Everyone except Ignis flinches at the sound. Ignis touches Noct’s face, fingertips barely brushing over Noct’s cheek and the line of his jaw. Then he pushes him to behind the table, pressing down on his shoulder until he sits on the floor, tucked between table and wall. Prompto goes with him and is almost glad Ignis doesn’t even glance at him.

It’s the worst barricade in the world. Bullets will punch right through it, Prompto has time to think. It never occurred to him before that this is how he’d end up dying. He doesn’t want to die. Does he want it less than he wants to kill people? Surely there’s another way out. He’s still trembling.

‘Don’t look,’ Ignis says, very softly, before leaving them there.

Noct grips Prompto’s arm, tight enough to hurt.

Prompto has a split-second to realise that even if he doesn’t look around the table, he can still see in the room’s reflection in the window.

He’s just in time to see the first of Ignis’ knives leave his hand and slice open a man’s throat. The flesh splits open neatly and blood sprays out; Prompto’s eyes snap shut. It doesn’t block the bubbling sound of wet gagging, somehow audible over the screams, shouting, and gunfire. Prompto hears something like that one time he’d blocked the kitchen sink and let it overflow, and it takes a few seconds to realise it’s not water he’s hearing splattering onto the wood flooring.

Even with his hands over his ears he can still hear everything. He thinks, abstractedly and distantly, that he ought to get up and help Ignis, back him up like he always does in battle. He can’t move. His whole body is frozen stiff. He feels like he’s eight years old again, home alone and out of his mind with childish terror. He feels like he’s fallen into a dream, because this really, really doesn’t feel like reality any more. He’s breathing hard but silent, shaking, and he wants to grasp hold of Noct, or jump out the window, or run and run and run and never looking back, but he can’t move.

More than anything else in the world, he wants to wake up.

A woman is screaming, and screaming, and it feels like hours before her screams turn into ragged sobs. It’s the only sound left.

‘Please,’ she sobs. ‘Please, don’t – please, oh gods, please, I'm sorry–’

She stops sobbing. There’s the gentle sound of something slumping over.

Now it’s quiet, he realises his breathing isn’t silent after all.

Something touches his shoulder, and Prompto flinches. ‘Noct,’ Ignis says, then adds: ‘Prompto.’

His voice is level, pitched low, a gentle monotone. It reminds Prompto of the time he’d caught Ignis talking about nothing to his chocobo, and the thought is so absurd Prompto shoves it away violently.

‘Close your eyes.’

It doesn’t sound like an order, but Prompto knows it is one. His eyes are already closed anyway, and his hands fall from his ears as he lets Ignis tug him into standing. His legs are weak enough he thinks they might buckle as he’s led, blind, an arm around his upper back, out of the room. They don’t buckle. The floor is soaking wet and the wetness is sticky. He wants simultaneously to open his eyes and also to sink back down to the floor and never look at anything ever again. The memory of the reflection, distorted in dirty glass, of Ignis and the man and the knife in the man’s throat, burns into the blackness of his closed eyes.

‘You can look, now,’ Ignis says, still in that same voice. Prompto doesn’t look. He stands still, focusing on the feeling of the floor – dry, threadbare carpet – under his feet and Noct pressed up against his side. When Ignis’ arm leaves his back, he realises he’s unbearably glad for it, and the realisation shakes him. ‘Come on, we’re going back to the Regalia.’

His feet won’t move. His eyes won’t open. He’s still waiting to wake up.

He’s fought giant beasts and daemons and MTs. Why is he this frightened? Why can’t he get over it?

‘Prompto?’ That’s Noct. Prompto opens his eyes and starts walking, following Ignis down the hotel corridor, and now it’s him clinging to Noct and not the other way round. The stillness and silence of the corridor don’t feel real either.

Ignis is on his phone, but his voice is too quiet for Prompto to hear what he’s saying. That, and the buzz in Prompto's ears and light-headedness probably don’t help. There’s no one in the grubby reception.

Gladio’s outside, waiting there at the hotel entrance to wordlessly gather him and Noct up and herd them to the parking lot, and get them in the back seat of the Regalia. It’s cold in there. Prompto’s teeth are chattering. When Gladio gets in and starts driving, without Ignis, Prompto tries to sink into the seat and stop existing.

‘Iggy’s gone back to clear things up,’ Gladio says. Prompto thinks he's trying to sound in control and comforting, but he's failing badly. ‘We’ll find somewhere safer to spend the night and pick him up in the morning.’

No one replies. The purr of the engine is soothing, even if they are driving in the dark. Prompto keeps his eyes closed, kicks off his dirty shoes, and pulls his legs up onto the seat, tucking himself into the smallest possible space. He manages to think that he should be worried about leaving Ignis behind, but he isn’t. He’s not worried at all. He's not quite sure what to do with that knowledge.


End file.
